No. 871

Cromesquis of Game Stanislas

Cromesquis de Gibier a la Stanislas

Made with either snipe, grouse, young rabbit, partridge or plover with truffles. Remove the skin and nervous parts from some roast game, prepare a pound of the meat and cut it into three-sixteenths of an inch squares, and cut up four ounces of truffles exactly the same. Reduce a quart of espagnole sauce (No. 414), with some game fumet made with the carcasses and a little meat glaze (No. 402), season, add the game and truffles, let boil and cool off. Prepare a few exceedingly thin, small bands of fat pork, seven inches in length and three-quarters of an inch wide, also some round pieces two and a quarter inches in diameter. Divide and roll the preparation into one and a half inch diameter balls, flatten them down to three-quarters of an inch in thickness, and roll the band around the edge, lay the round pieces on top and bottom, then dip the cromesquis into a frying paste (No. 137, No. 2), and plunge them into very hot fat to attain a fine color, drain and dress them pyramidically on a folded napkin with a bunch of fried parsley on top.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A croquette in disguise: cooked game bound in a stiff sauce, jacketed in fat pork, battered and fried. Ranhofer assumes you have a brigade and a numbered sauce cupboard, so the work is mostly in what he cross-references.

Chill the filling hardThe reduction is the hinge. A quart of espagnole with fumet and glaze must be cooked down until a spoon drawn through it leaves a clean track, then the mixture spread on a tray and refrigerated until it can be cut and rolled without slumping. A filling that is even slightly soft will burst the fat and batter in the fryer.
Espagnole and fumetNo. 414 is a long-simmered brown sauce; a good reduced brown veal or game stock thickened lightly will stand in. The game fumet is simply the roast carcasses simmered down with the trimmings, and No. 402 meat glaze is stock reduced to a syrup. Between them they carry all the seasoning, so taste before adding salt.
"Fat pork"Fresh pork fatback, sliced on a slicer to near transparency, or caul fat, which many later kromeski recipes use and which is easier to buy. Not bacon; the cure and smoke will dominate. The bands should overlap slightly and cling to the chilled filling without pins.
Frying pasteNo. 137 is Ranhofer's set of frying batters; the variant called for should be thin enough to coat and cling. Test one on a spoon: it should veil the back without running off in sheets.
Fat temperatureRanhofer says only "very hot fat," which in practice means around 375F. Lower and the batter soaks; higher and it colours before the interior warms. Fry two or three at a time to hold the temperature, frying until deep gold.
Fried parsleyDry flat-leaf sprigs plunged into the same fat for about fifteen seconds, until the spitting stops and the leaves are crisp and still green. Wet parsley will erupt, so blot it thoroughughly first.
PloverRanhofer offers it as one of five options; in the United States plovers are protected and may not be shot or sold, and in Britain most plovers are protected, golden plover being the exception as a quarry species in season, with sale restricted. Snipe, grouse, partridge and rabbit remain legal game where in season, and any of them makes the dish as written.
TrufflesFour ounces of truffle to a pound of meat is a Gilded Age proportion. A smaller quantity of fresh black truffle, or good preserved truffle with its juice added to the reduction, gives the intended perfume without the cost.

A Little History

Cromesquis is the French spelling of kromeski, a croquette of Polish or Russian ancestry, distinguished from an ordinary croquette by being wrapped in caul or pork fat and dipped in batter rather than rolled in crumbs. It entered French professional cookery in the nineteenth century and appears throughout Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), his enormous record of the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York. The name Stanislas is generally taken as a nod to Stanisław Leszczyński, the deposed Polish king who ruled Lorraine in the mid-eighteenth century and to whom French kitchens have long attached Polish-tinged dishes, though such garnish names in Ranhofer are conventional labels rather than documented histories. The recipe also shows how nineteenth-century restaurants used yesterday's roasts: game already carried to the table returns as a hot side dish, its carcasses cooked down for the sauce that binds it.